[Prestidigitweeze]

The problem with the show-don't-tell edict is that it can privilege cinematic narratives over the purely verbal kind. I can see the allure of cinematic fiction in the early-to-mid-twentieth century, when movies inspired writers while replacing novels as mainstream entertainment. They must have seemed a curative for literary self-importance. Bertolucci's homage to the anarcho-critical '60s, The Dreamers, conveys the visceral excitement which so many writers felt in movie theaters (even though it's not one of his better flicks). Poets like Prevert and Desnos would absorb the energy onscreen, then dash out and fling themselves at the world.

Dennis Cooper's a rather interesting case of the writer who does both. He's well acquainted with Hemingway's iceberg method as used endlessly in film (instead of saying that a character is perturbed, show her stirring coffee in a way that conveys her perturbation). Yet he's also informed by the tell side of French cinema, particularly the Alain Resnais film, Providence, which is the structural key to nearly all of Cooper's work. Like Resnais, Cooper interrupts the show side of his own obsession-deterministic narratives to pull back the camera and reveal the author, a fictional neurotic who had been showing and not telling before stopping to express his ambivalence at his own propensity for cruelty.

That might sound as though it wouldn't be interesting, but I find it far more engaging than Hemingway's unexamined processions of action. I'm sure you know what Gertrude Stein said about him: "He looks like a modern, but he smells like a museum." In a story like Safe or Frisk, Cooper's narrator awakens from his dreams of surgical cruelty -- of physical and emotional amputations that can recall '80s Cronenberg -- to discover that the people who surround him are actually kind, and that his own ambivalence and fear have created this false continuum of tension.

You can't really write a novel like that without telling. Neither, in their own ways, could Thomas Bernhard (Concrete) or John Hawkes (Travesty).

Also: George Eliot confected a masterful mix of show and tell in Middlemarch, which is arguably the greatest novel of the Victorian period. That book is a treatise on the ideas of the period as well as an excellent story.

To gmw:

I have nothing against your preferences in fiction, and can see that critical thought and taste are involved. I also appreciated the way you expressed your ideas. But I would argue that some novelists are better off embedding their essays in the novel itself (though not Tolstoy).

Generally, I think it is a mistake to conflate rhetorical/intellectual restraint with actual humility. The novelist who tries to impress you with humility is often the biggest egotist in the room.

Besides, the novel has been with us at least since the days of Murasaki Shikibu. There are more kinds of engaging fiction than there are flavors of ice cream, and I'd hate to forgo the Saccadic leaps of John Donne for the sake of upholding an erudition-constrained ideal.